Fredric Jameson and Anti-Anti-Utopianism (Part I: Archaeologies of the Future) (Essay‪)‬

In the following I want to give an account of Fredric Jameson's theory of Utopia as presented in Archaeologies of the Future. (1) Like Thomas More's Utopia, this is actually two books, the second written before the first, since the latter is made up of eleven previously published essays on science fiction and Utopia, while the first part, aptly entitled 'The Desire Called Utopia', was written as an introduction to those essays. (2) In such an account, of course, I can only begin to address Jameson's theories and will thus limit myself to the 250 pages of the Introduction, 'The Desire Called Utopia', calling attention to a few of the highlights of this dense but rewarding text, while leaving the specific readings of the second part and the question of science fiction aside. As many of his readers know, Jameson has had a long involvement with science fiction and Utopia--stretching back at least to 1971 and Marxism and Form, where he proclaimed the importance and timeliness of the utopian impulse: